Sex Pistols' Winn Dixie

Out Yobs in Atlanta: Sex Pistols 4, Bollocks 2

ATLANTA--If the Sex Pistols believe that by skipping punksymp
sanctuaries like New York, Boston, Los Angeles, and Detroit on their
first American tour they'll get to confront the true Amerika head-on,
then I hope they take their debut to heart, because they opened in a
shopping center. Talk about bland-out. At least Pittsburgh, where they
would have premiered if the State Department hadn't intervened, has
that ring of steel to it, although it's true that even there they were
more likely to attract executives' children than union men's. In
Atlanta, where one post-underground newspaper calls itself Creative
Loafing and the queue out of the prestige music club leads to a
Winn Dixie supermarket, they were at the mercy of the children of
Coca-Cola (hold the Marx).

The Great Southeast Music Hall, the club is called, and a pleasant
place it is: beer in buckets, better pinball than CBGB, and an
official capacity of 523. The Pistols had sold out there almost a week
before, when their visas were finally approved and the January 5 date
became a certainty, but I spoke to two Emory students from Long Island
who snapped up unconfirmed reservations for the prescribed $3.50 at
four o'clock that afternoon, thus foiling scalpers who were asking
$25. Some 40 or 50 tickets were purchased by print newspersons--the
Pistols permitted Warners to reserve places for the press, but forbade
freebies. It's not clear whether any of the five TV teams
present--three local networks, the BBC, and Today, which
roasted Our Yobs come morning--paid to get in. The four vice cops
definitely saw the show for nothing.

Music was scheduled to begin at 8:30, but by the time my contingent
arrived at 7:30 there was already a long line, and a team of
sociologists led by Dr. Richard Dixon of the University of North
Carolina and Dr. Richard Levinson of Emory was distributing
questionnaires. I filled one out myself, thus joining a sample of 122,
and later telephoned Dixon, a specialist in the sociology of leisure,
for results of the preliminary print-out. The respondents were about
three-quarters male, I was told, with a mean and modal age of 24. Half
worked full-time, a quarter were students, and a third (presumably
including lots of people who let Dan do the breadwinning) indicated a
family income of over $25,000 a year. About two-thirds had heard the
Pistols' music on record, and one-fifth said they attended solely out
of an enthusiasm for punk rock. 72.9 per cent believed premarital
intercourse was "not wrong at all"; 67.5 per cent thought the same of
homosexual intercourse; only 30 per cent felt marital infidelity was
"always" or "almost always wrong"; and 76.2 per cent had never been
married.

Although I'd guess that the proportion of women attending was somewhat
higher, these figures sound right to me. This was not only an
affluent, well-educated crowd, it was also "hip"--which means that
its concept of leisure included stimulation as well as relaxation and
escape. There were plenty of curiosity-seekers, but their curiosity
was generally sympathetic and often informed. In this they defied a
hostile and imperiously ignorant media atmosphere. Bill King of the
Atlanta Constitution, for instance, had written
that the Pistols' album, which has been showing up on many 10-best
lists, was the worst he had listened to all year and possibly ever,
while the big AM station made a point of sending only news staff to
cover what it regarded as a definitely unmusical event. The prevailing
images were spit and vomit; the police stipulated that the Pistols
could do what they liked to at each other, but that if they aimed
their effusions at the audience the concert would be halted as a
hazard to health.

The crowning metaphor, however, was provided by--who else?--the rock
and rollers who opened the show, a good-time '60s copy band from
Georgia Tech who will be referred to here as the Shitheads. Although
the Shitheads had their virtues--smart steals from the Searchers and
the Music Machine, dumb semi-camp Elvis medley--they got the job
primarily because their music doesn't resemble the Pistols', and I
thought the crowd received their 55-minute set with some
kindness. Nevertheless, the band responded peevishly to cries of
"Anarchy!" and "Bollocks!" that arose between numbers. "We'll make you
feel at home--we'll spit," was one bit of repartee, but their most
telling comment didn't even masquerade as a joke: "Some people just
take things too seriously." About 40 minutes into the set the
Shitheads brought out a special guest, "Atlanta's leading punk." This
turned out to be an exceptionally hirsute person wearing a "Kill Me"
T-shirt and carrying a large papier-mâché safety pin who sang two
almost identical two-chord songs--both called, apparently, "Boot in
Your Face." He also spat at the audience, but the cops, praise the
Lord, restrained themselves.

Only 20 minutes after the Shitheads went off, the four musicians we
were there to see strolled onto the stage and stood around; their
leader murmured a few remarks and then said quietly into the mike, "My
name's John and this is the Sex Pistols." The cheering and thumping,
already quite enthusiastic, coalesced into an ovation, but only 15 per
cent of the house was on its feet. Rotten offered a silent
gesture--like a preacher bidding his congregation to rise for the
hymn, but less peremptory--and almost everyone got up. The band
launched into "God Save the Queen." "That was the new British national
anthem," Rotten sighed, not too wittily; after a pause he added a more
pointed comment: "Forget about starin' at us, just fuckin'
dance. We're all ugly and we know it."

Mere sensationalism--the Pistols aren't especially ugly. Guitarist
Steve Jones, a beefy bloke in a flash red-and-black stage suit, and
bassist Sid Vicious, who bared his long, scrawny chest after the first
song, did contort their faces into nominally hideous sneers and
grimaces, but the drummer, Paul Cook, who was wearing a mint Warner
Bros. Never Mind the Boolicks T-shirt, didn't even bother with
that. And Rotten was beautiful. With the layered look of a busker in
the Piccadilly subway--ill-fitting overcoat, suitcoat, vest, shirt,
necktie--he reeled around generating charisma like there was no
future. Rotten's presences defies superlatives; take away the mocking,
wistful grin and the awkward-seeming poses he strikes in the middle of
getting his body from one place to another and you'd still have those
preternatural eyes, eyes like blue Christmas-tree lights that go on
and off with some irrefutable logic of their own. Midway through the
set Bob Regehr, the Warners a&r chief who signed the Pistols and whose
career may well depend on theirs, strode over and shouted: "Christgau,
I don't care what happens any more, they're all right. It was all
worth it and Johnny Rotten is a fucking superstar." I know what he
was feeling--this boy is one of a kind.

Unfortunately, the concert as a whole was less than transcendent. Very
good, yes; the first four songs were stiff, but after that I was moved
to do my balls-of-the-feet pogo with unusual bounce. Only on "Holidays
in the Sun," however, did I become airborne, and while there was a lot
of fine frenzy in the room, it never quite approached full-scale
abandon. I suppose some of this could be blamed on musicianship--the
Pistols don't play as effectively as the Clash or Television or the
Ramones, and Rotten's Protean, scarifying vocals lacked the power and
precision of the record. Or maybe the problem is a musical concept as
close to Aerosmith as punk, we should be so lucky, ever ought to
get. But the big factor was anticlimax. Johnny Rotten has gotten
further on print than any rock star in history; the sheer volume of
his myth guarantees a shortfall, albeit from a titanic standard.

This means that John and his lazy sods will have to work hard just to
keep up with themselves. In Atlanta, where two Pistols dressed like
ordinary rock stars and Rotten himself did nothing more offensive than
pick his nose, the sly understatement was just right. Not everyone
hoping to be shown the light left with eyes shining, but there is
universal agreement that the Pistols expanded their core of fans; even
Bill King, apparently nervous enough to essay a serious hatchet job,
allowed as how they were mediocre. There still isn't one radio station
in the city that will play their music, though--a problem that is
hardly limited to Atlanta. The Sex Pistols are going to have to really
slog it to convince a support group of young and youthful Americans
that it doesn't hurt to take rock and roll seriously. Not that it
hurts to laugh about it, either--strike pose, flash eyes, unzip
grin. But Johnny Rotten's message is that life is more than a
leisure-time activity, and that is a truth that the children of
Coca-Cola find hard to swallow.